my mobile phone decided to die over the weekend so i had to pay a visit to the
orange shop on old broad street. what's gadget of the week then?... i give you
the nokia 6310i which comes replete with bluetooth, gprs, wap and
tri-band functions.

now, bluetooth is extremely useful but
unless the manufacturers sort things out pretty darn quickly it will never take
off beyond being just a cool gadget. it has taken me almost 3 hours to get the
laptop talking properly to the phone. the reason? well obviously you don't get
provided with the correct version of the software. if things were simple you
would go to the nokia web site and download the latest version but after doing
a bit of reading you have to go to the nokia website for asia/pacific and
download the software for a different model phone. and all because it appears
nokia have not stuck rigidly to the bluetooth standards so anyone with
different hardware to that used to write the interfaces and you have to jump
through several hoops.

i know a bit about computers and am fairly confident upgrading drivers etc. but
someone who is not so confident (or is that foolhardy) would probably not even
bother getting it going, at which point the handset just becomes an expensive
version of what you could buy 4 years ago.